So what are allies for? How Europeans respond to this will dictate the way forward but I guess a lot of European leaders will now doubt they can trust America for the next 4 years and then who knows.Originally Posted by Yevrah
So what are allies for? How Europeans respond to this will dictate the way forward but I guess a lot of European leaders will now doubt they can trust America for the next 4 years and then who knows.
I would be interested how fox is reporting this, but I tend to have Bloomberg on and they’re in complete shock at what they just saw.
Also interested how republican senate and congress persons feel about trump threatening to abandon Ukraine.
We are not Ukraine’s allies. Were we we wouldn’t have sidled up to Russia for 20 years, ignored what happened in Crimea and let them into NATO.
He had a choice as to whether he went or not.
None of this will have been planned. Trump is completely uncontrollable, his little lap dog is an ostensible idiot and no one behind the scenes will have had the nous to wargame "what if Zelensky doesn't go for it?"
It's all sycophants this time around, which means it will be much more entertaining.
It can't be stated enough how thick JD Vance is. One of the worst type of Americans, who think that being the smartest guy in Shitbucket, Alabama (population 17) means you are also the smartest guy in the world.
At one point, Ukraine's ambassador to the US appeared to have her head in her hands, clearly displeased with the way the meeting was going.
Just seen it. Zelensy donned Vance absolutely senseless.
More coherent in a second language. Damning.
I think Zelensky has got a bit used to turning up in his workwear and playing on politicians desperate to associate themselves with him. He should have just praised American support and batted away any questions about disagreements, pricing in the fact that Trump will just blurt out the very same shit he will normally be told in private, but he thought he could big man it for the journalists like he usually does, and then you get this all-round embarrassment.
Zelensky still slated to appear on Fox at 11.
That will be dynamite.
This.
Vance is a slimy prick.
This all goes back to that "beautiful phone call" in 2019.
Vance is a legend. Your next president.
Long live Xi Jinping.
I was wondering the other day what the mechanism for getting rid of Xi (71) would/will eventually be. Normally they call some conference of about 600,000 delegates entitled something like 'The People's Committee for Propagation and Reconstitution of Public, Adminstrative and Municipal Conventions' and at the end of it whoever hasn't been taken ill with a mysterious sweating sickness is the new chairman.
Haven't heard of any rivals or anything to him though, so he must be good at murder.
Any billionaire that you’d think could harm him ends up mysteriously disappearing for a few months ala the AliBaba guy. Meanwhile the entire American system is getting rail roaded by an autist nazi with a ketamine problem and Trump tickles his balls. I know who the real leader is. Silk and road time.
It’s a perfect summary of the hollowness at the soul of that country that Andrew Tate is granted more grace than the President of the country who got invaded.
I was initially really hoping our limp wristed far left cunts of politicians wouldn’t get an invite for Patricks day this year, but I can’t wait for it now
That...interview? Debate? Is so fucking cringe. Zelensky is like an adult trying to deal with a couple of petulant toddlers. America is a fucking embarrassment.
This seems an odd critique from Trump:
Zelensky "overplayed his hand" and "wants to fight, fight, fight".
Good god, just seen the actual full spat.
Also, why didn't you wear a suit? I thought Vance was some sort of tech bro wannabe, who the fuck wears a suit?
Last edited by niko_cee; 28-02-2025 at 10:39 PM.
Trump (and by extension Vance because he's a skinsuit with no agency of his own) both go on about gratitude and I think this is what it boils down to. Not something that Zelensky could do for the US as a state but what he was unwilling to do for Trump the person, Trump doesn't separate those two things and sees helping Ukraine as a personal favour so if there's nothing in it for him then he isn't interested. It makes the piss tape theory so much more compelling when considered in these terms.
Just started my 60 minute free pass for fox news.
Not sure I can make 15 minutes until the actual interview as weird right wing Matthew Perry whamps on to some botoxed 'females'.
One of them has just described DR Congo as one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
There is no hope. Maybe we'd be better off if these idiots just stuck to their own landmass.
Yeah bit weird mugging Zelensky off as disrespecting the Oval Office by not wearing a suit: Musk is in there all the time not wearing a suit?
I think the key takeaway from the whole thing is the perfect illustration of Dunning-Kruger situation that society finds itself in.
If you support Trump theres 3 takeaways
To a dumb guy, they see Trump and Vance disrespecting Zelensky and think "America, fuck yeah"
To a dumb guy that thinks they're smart, they think that by acting tough that the guy who's been fighting a war against a country 5 times the size of him for years will cave.
To the actual smart guy, he's just hoping Trump forgets about it next week because the two other group outnumber them.
The final thought before the next batch of ads is please buy our fox news pickle ball [wtf?] set, only $70. Again, all hope is lost.
They actually said golden age. Are the aiming for a new roaring twenties?
Interview not that interesting.
Let's see what 11 minutes of adverts for drugs and/or their commentators reaction looks like.
I'm amazed they think Dr Congo is anything other than someone ICE should be rounding up any day now.
Come on, man. He's trying to save his country without giving up everything. Trump trying to strongarm him in public is fucking gross.
The arrogance of Vance trying to tell Zelensky about the conditions in Ukraine from "seeing stories on TV". School yard bullies who are thick as fuck.
The whole have you said thank you, be grateful episode was just awful.
Zelensky could have dealt with it better, maybe, but it must be hard when you've got people just shouting lies at you. Surely his strongest line would have been to try to impress on them that whenever they signed that agreement with Russia [2019?] Trump was President and 3 years later Russia broke it. They need to know that if they sign a deal with them all again in 2025 then, in 4 years time, when Donald is no longer the President, AGAIN, that Russia won't do exactly the same again [it will] - but then Trump would probably get mad about you suggesting a future time when he wasn't going to be president anymore.
I still don't really understand how this all blowing up and them [The yanks] taking their ball home is really going to help them in the long run.
Last edited by niko_cee; 01-03-2025 at 08:38 AM.
He should have called him President Krasnov.
Can totally understand why JD Vance's mum chose taking heroin instead of spending time with that cunt
Having watched it all now (by which I mean including before it turned) it’s all on Vance. He’s massively out of his depth and can’t remotely cope with being schooled by Zelensky.
To be fair, that part of Zelensky saying to Vance that Russia continually break every truce and agreement was the start of the argument.
I think there's a slightly romantic tendency among some of the more 'realist' observers to view Russia as its 19th century imperial self, or as the Soviet Union at the peak of its powers, or as the great Russian bear, or whatever, rather than the kleptocrat gangster state that it actually is. There is absolutely no guarantee that anything about it will survive Putin's personal rule.
It had absolutely not occurred to me up until Googling his mother on the back of this that the Hillbilly Elegy film (which I did see at the time, not quite as bad as it was made out to be but still not very good at all) was based on his life. I knew it was based on a book by someone but I had not put two and two together since and realised that someone was him.
Vance was saying that there needs to be a diplomatic solution to this. Zelensky said that there can't be any diplomacy with Russia, and suggested that Vance would realise this if he went to Ukraine and did the concerned face tour. Putting aside whether or not attempting to show the Vice President up in front of the media to bounce the Americans into open-ended security guarantees was a good idea, consider the implications of what he was saying. No diplomacy? How does he expect this to play out then? This returns us to the enduring question of how Ukraine wins without a general Russian collapse or a direct American intervention.
Him citing the Minsk Agreement[s] was a bit of a bold move as well given that all of the non-Russian parties have subsequently said that they never intended to abide by them, and that they were merely signed to allow Ukraine to build its forces up for renewed conflict against the separatists. Those statements have probably done more to put the Russians off a diplomatic solution than anything, and all stated at times when they would have been more open to one because Ukraine had a lot more fight left in it.
What is a "diplomatic solution"? Giving Russia some Ukrainian territory? What kind of precedent does that set? Russia just restarts the war every couple of years until the whole of Ukraine is signed over?
You're obviously far more knowledgeable than me on this, but is that not quite literally the appeasement policy circa WW2?
What Vance was saying was show fealty and do what you're told.
But Russia aren't going to pull out just because Ukraine bends the knee to the US, nor would it make Trump suddenly put in the required sanctions/military might/funding/whatever would be required to drive Russia out. So that's not really a diplomatic solution to actually ending the war.
If I'm perfectly honest, I think Trump is fully in Putin's pocket and went into yesterday with the decision to cut support already made. That show was created purely to give him an excuse.
The US' cyber security department have just been told to cease all work against Russia. Insane move unless you're on the same side.
What's the alternative? We keep pumping billions into this and (more importantly) Ukranians and Russians keep being killed at least until Putin dies?
Signing any land over is obviously unpalatable, but this is literally a war Ukraine cannot win (even with our and everyone else's continued support) so it strikes me that continuing to try to is just delaying the inevitable while costing thousands upon thousands of lives in the process.
Ok, but if you sign land over and then Russia tries for more, what then? When does it end?
It doesn't set any precedent. It's simply what happens when one side wins a war and the other side loses it. Israel, Turkey, Azerbaijan... All friends of ours, all currently sitting on land that officially doesn't belong to them because they took it and nobody cares enough to do anything about it.
There will inevitably be some sort of diplomatic solution, even if it merely consists of some shell Ukrainian authority agreeing to things Russia wants. At the moment the solution might look something like Ukraine remaining neutral, having limits imposed on its armed forces, and losing slightly more land than Russia currently occupies. Further down the line, should its capacity to resist completely collapse, they might lose even more territory. What happens beyond that nobody knows. Russia could have another nibble at them, but doing so would be pointless if they have already achieved the above. Plus Poland might backstop rump Western Ukraine. They would be quite sensible to do so. It doesn't mean we should.
Isn't the thing here that 'diplomatic solution' and 'surrender and give me whatever stuff the other guy hasn't nicked' aren't really in the same part of the war outcomes Venn diagram?
Ukraine were clearly being somewhat willingly herded towards some kind of outcome away from their absolute terms until shit for brains and co started looking at it as some sort of mortgagee sale.
Other than as a bit of a fuck you to Donald, which seems insane, why is Zelensky meeting the king tomorrow?
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